World Peace

Doyle

English 101 Section 3500

Professor Cathey

September 26, 2006

World peace, an ideal immortalized in songs by idols such as John Lennon and Edwin Starr. Americans may be familiar with the term from simple beauty pageants wherein contestants wish for world peace in order to appeal to judge’s expectations. But is it plausible? Well in order to answer this question, one must ask even more.

To discover whether or not world peace is truly able to exist we must define what is meant by the term. If by world peace we imply Utopianism, we perceive a conflict-free society. This may be seen as improbable due to the changing in circumstance and action of human beings. But in order to be a conflict-free people it would either require us to be totally independent from one another or to lose our individuality, which characteristically makes us human.

To translate the word utopia, which comes from Greek, one would find that it can mean either of two things. Utopia can be translated to either outopeia, which means ‘no-place land’, or eutopeia, which means ‘good-place land’. This may suggest that although utopia describes a perfected society, it is ultimately unreachable. I believe this is true because of the sheer fact of human nature. We were but wild beasts once, and our instinct is still primarily territorial and protective. To quote Bertrand Russell:

“After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare, in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”

Even so, many theories towards world peace exist.

One theory of attaining world peace considers creating international free-trade which would prevent a nation from becoming self sufficient and therefore removing the possibility of a long war. The main idea behind this theory is that if one nation, say providing weapons, and the other manufacturing ammo, were to be at war, they would eventually run out of resources. This theory has a fault. For example, in the war between the United States and Iraq, nations have created alliances with one another as back-ups. The same